North Korea

German photojournalist Julia Leeb made two trips inside North Korea in 2012 and 2013, and she took photos that offer a glimpse into perhaps the most isolated and mysterious country in the world. She's collected some of what she saw in a new book of photographs called North Korea: Anonymous Country.

(This is the third of three articles. Read parts one and two here.) North Korea is hardly known for its permissive attitude toward political dissent. For some 70 years, open political challenges to the government have been met with precision brutality.

UNITED NATIONS - Seven months after a groundbreaking report documenting how North Korea tortured and starved its citizens, a broad coalition of countries is pushing for the first time to refer Pyongyang to the International Criminal Court for prosecution of crimes against humanity.

The gulags of North Korea exist in a strange world between secret and unsecret. No one knows for sure how many thousands or millions are locked away in the camps, which officially do not exist, and information about what goes on there can be sparse.

Most people hack their pumpkins up like some sort of butcher, but Jeanette Paras prefers to paint famous faces on hers. Paras has been painting celebrities on pumpkins since before Taylor Swift was born (1988, to be exact), and since then, she's turned massive pumpkins into the likes of Miley Cyrus, Prince Harry, Jay Leno and Santa Claus.

Thousands of migrant labourers from North Korea are toiling for years on construction sites in Qatar for virtually no pay - including on the vast new metropolis that is the centrepiece of the World Cup - in what may amount to 'state-sponsored slavery'.

For travelers visiting North Korea, taking the wrong photo can be a punishable offense. Guides stay close to tourists, letting them know when it's okay to snap the shutter, and North Korean citizens are supposed to report any photography they see. Professional photojournalists are rarely allowed to enter the country.

The news from North Korea is usually nasty and bizarre, especially in the three years since Kim Jong-un inherited the insidious personality cult of his grandfather and father. The 30-something Kim was said to have fed his disgraced and once-powerful uncle to a pack of dogs for disrespecting him.

Faced with mystery, we project ourselves onto it - stretching our misapprehensions to fill the glaring gaps on the screen. For decades, North Korea has been the least illuminated of mysteries, the rare insights often stranded without context.

Faced with mystery, we project ourselves onto it - stretching our misapprehensions to fill the glaring gaps on the screen. For decades, North Korea has been the least illuminated of mysteries, the rare insights often stranded without context.

I set my phone to silent, dressed myself entirely in black and walked calmly and purposefully through the hotel lobby. Outside I hailed a cab and directed the driver to take me to the point where the town ended, about 200 yards from the river.

He was the Tammany Hall boss of North Korea, the man who dispensed favors and stayed close to the ruling Kim family, so close he married the daughter of the nation's founder. He got rich by selling commodities to China: low-end coal and probably the more valuable rare earths.

Faced with mystery, we project ourselves onto it - stretching our misapprehensions to fill the glaring gaps on the screen. For decades, North Korea has been the least illuminated of mysteries, the rare insights often stranded without context.

Kim Jong Il has come up with a new way to bring cold hard cash into his isolated country: export North Korean workers to slave away in the Siberian forest. VICE founder Shane Smith travels to Russia to investigate a chain of North Korean labor camps in the Amur region.

At the best of times, life is not great for most North Koreans. They live in an isolated totalitarian state beset by food shortages and ruled through fear by one of the world's most repressive regimes. But spare a thought for denizens of the Hermit Kingdom toiling there right now, amid a brutal heat wave that has seen temperatures surge past the July average.

Kim Jong-un's regime in North Korea is infamous for its brutality, with "purges" of top officials regularly reported, and tens of thousands of citizens known to be imprisoned in concentration camps. But the extreme secrecy that persists in the Hermit Kingdom rarely allows for a detailed accounting of exactly how often the draconian government kills its own people.

Perhaps no country on earth is more misunderstood by Americans than is North Korea. Though the country's leadership is typically portrayed as buffoonish, even silly, in fact they are deadly serious in their cruelty and skill at retaining power. Though the country is seen as Soviet-style Communist, in fact it is better understood as a hold-over of Japanese fascism.

Like many other young Americans, Taylor Pemberton went on vacation this summer and shared photos of the trip on Instagram. But instead of taking beach selfies or food 'grams like his peers, Pemberton's Instagram account houses a collection of incredible, everyday images from his visit to North Korea.

Outsiders don't often get to see behind the closed doors of North Korea-and when we do, what we usually see of its tightly-controlled society is usually strict conformity or bleakness. Photographer Mihaela Noroc offers a rare perspective with images from her series The Atlas of Beauty, which celebrates the diversity of beauty through portraits of ordinary women around the world.

The following account is written by a field coordinator for Liberty in North Korea, an international NGO that assists in the rescue and resettlement of North Korean refugees. This account contains elements from several missions. Identities have been omitted so as not to compromise any one group.

It was party time in Pyongyang. Workers scrambled to hang congratulatory banners in the lobby of the Koryo Hotel, my home away from home in the North Korean capital, where I was posted as an Associated Press correspondent.

The short-term questions about North Korea's alleged nuclear test are important. Has there been a real test? What does this mean for the regime's position? Is Kim Jong Un still trying to consolidate power by pandering to the hardliners of his regime? How will China react? All of these are important questions.

North Korea is a joke, and shame on us for laughing. The "Hermit Kingdom" with its retro aesthetic and its goofy-looking leader makes us laugh, from our well-heated homes. That's what The Interview and "Kim Jong-Il Looking at Things" are all about.